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SamPattyesterday at 8:13 PM2 repliesview on HN

No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries.

Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.


Replies

chowellsyesterday at 10:51 PM

As Led Zeppelin once said, "you know sometimes words have two meanings". That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust. But it's not the definition of wealth that applies when used to describe a person. A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things. That's a hoarder. A wealthy person is someone who can use their economic power to shape the world around them.

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customguyyesterday at 10:39 PM

You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services.

The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.

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